Please especially test all the fancy new things in this release!One late feature (came in with beta3) I would like to especially point out are the new masterpages in Impress by Alexander Wilms, Mateus Machado Luna, Stefan Knorr and all the other cool guys on the LibreOffice design team. And before anyone screams "pics or it didnt happen!" -- here is a screenshot of them running on Ubuntu Quantal:

Please especially test all the fancy new things in this release!One late feature (came in with beta3) I would like to especially point out are the new masterpages in Impress by Alexander Wilms, Mateus Machado Luna, Stefan Knorr and all the other cool guys on the LibreOffice design team. And before anyone screams "pics or it didnt happen!" -- here is a screenshot of them running on Ubuntu Quantal:

which still contained lots of old, obsolete and even misleading content in a huge unsorted page, which likely nobody bothered to clean up because it ... was a huge unsorted page. I hope the new pages with lots of obsolete stuff killed and lots of nonessential/reference stuff moved down to the end of the page, leaving the top of the page for the essentials will make life quite a bit easier for new contributors!
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which still contained lots of old, obsolete and even misleading content in a huge unsorted page, which likely nobody bothered to clean up because it ... was a huge unsorted page. I hope the new pages with lots of obsolete stuff killed and lots of nonessential/reference stuff moved down to the end of the page, leaving the top of the page for the essentials will make life quite a bit easier for new contributors!
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It seems like the gerrit for LibreOffice is ready for primetime now. I updated a sweet and short introduction on how to use it. If you want your first patch in LibreOffice, with gerrit you wont need a mailing list subscribe, a freedesktop account or any other administrative overhead. You just need this:

I hope, we can again lower the barrier to entry for new contributors and make the progress of LibreOffice more transparent with this. In addition, it will simplify the discussion of certain changes and give it some more structure. Finally, this enables us to significantly improve the use of our tinderboxes. I expect a lot of good things to happen there soon.
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It seems like the gerrit for LibreOffice is ready for primetime now. I updated a sweet and short introduction on how to use it. If you want your first patch in LibreOffice, with gerrit you wont need a mailing list subscribe, a freedesktop account or any other administrative overhead. You just need this:

I hope, we can again lower the barrier to entry for new contributors and make the progress of LibreOffice more transparent with this. In addition, it will simplify the discussion of certain changes and give it some more structure. Finally, this enables us to significantly improve the use of our tinderboxes. I expect a lot of good things to happen there soon.
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The master and the 3.5.x and 3.6.x release branches (links require OpenID login) on gerrit.libreoffice.org are now synced every 15 minutes by the friendly LibreOffice gerrit bot from freedesktop. If you based your patch on these branches more than 15 minutes ago, you can be sure to be able to send it there for review without any hassle. Once we make the gerrit repository our reference, this syncing isnt needed anymore of course (we would only need to push those changes to freedesktop then -- the other way around). But for all practical proposes, everyone should be able to submit his patches to gerrit with this.

The master and the 3.5.x and 3.6.x release branches (links require OpenID login) on gerrit.libreoffice.org are now synced every 15 minutes by the friendly LibreOffice gerrit bot from freedesktop. If you based your patch on these branches more than 15 minutes ago, you can be sure to be able to send it there for review without any hassle. Once we make the gerrit repository our reference, this syncing isnt needed anymore of course (we would only need to push those changes to freedesktop then -- the other way around). But for all practical proposes, everyone should be able to submit his patches to gerrit with this.

This is a short note, that I wrote some short and concise wiki pages on LibreOffice development on Ubuntu. Please dont tell me that there is way more info on the TDF Wiki, thats true -- but also not the point: In fact, there is quite possibly too much information on the TDF wiki ;). So this is the stripped down info on what you really need to know to start working on LibreOffice on Ubuntu:

This is a short note, that I wrote some short and concise wiki pages on LibreOffice development on Ubuntu. Please dont tell me that there is way more info on the TDF Wiki, thats true -- but also not the point: In fact, there is quite possibly too much information on the TDF wiki ;). So this is the stripped down info on what you really need to know to start working on LibreOffice on Ubuntu:

That would have been impossible with proprietary systems. It was Bill Joy who once pointed out it's impossible to hire all the smart people. Open source allows you to work and innovate with all the smart people.

Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world's population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally.

Open source allows people having ideas that seem foolish to the rest of the world to prove themselves right and the rest of the world wrong to the greater benefit of all. Being told "I am happy that there are crazy people like you on the LibreOffice project. Every sane person would have been sure that this cannot possibly work out." as a praise by Michael Stahl after putting out bibisect shows this is one of the core values of our project. Many others deserve the same praise for succeeding in doing things that were deemed impossible by others. Setting up the foundation in the way it was done was one of them, but there were many others.

And despite -- or maybe because of -- starting from nothing less than two years ago and bootstrapping all the tiny and big things that are needed to run a software project with more than 10 million lines of code, this project also en passant enabled things like this:

Despite initial skepticism, I by now firmly believe LibreOffice to be the project that will be able to change the world. Too many individuals in this project succeeded in doing the unreasonable, the foolish and the impossible. We started from nothing and we are still very hungry. We do not fear to innovate, just because someone thinks it would be unreasonable. We will: Stay hungry, Stay foolish. And we are just getting started.

P.S.: Lets each take this opportunity to look back down the road and thank somebody for doing something impossible, foolish or unreasonable. I, for one, thank Thorsten, Florian and Mike for their tireless and invisible work setting up the foundation: Thank you. And Norbert Thiebaud for doing all the hard work on the OneGit migration making bibisect possible in the first place: Again, Thank you! And Christopher M. Penalver, Rainer Bielefeld, Cor Nouws, Sasha and many more for relentless bug wrangling: Again, Thank you! And Rico Tzschichholz for providing backports: Again, Thank you!

Please add more thanks in the comments, on twitter, g+ or whatever!
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That would have been impossible with proprietary systems. It was Bill Joy who once pointed out it's impossible to hire all the smart people. Open source allows you to work and innovate with all the smart people.

Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world's population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally.

Open source allows people having ideas that seem foolish to the rest of the world to prove themselves right and the rest of the world wrong to the greater benefit of all. Being told "I am happy that there are crazy people like you on the LibreOffice project. Every sane person would have been sure that this cannot possibly work out." as a praise by Michael Stahl after putting out bibisect shows this is one of the core values of our project. Many others deserve the same praise for succeeding in doing things that were deemed impossible by others. Setting up the foundation in the way it was done was one of them, but there were many others.

And despite -- or maybe because of -- starting from nothing less than two years ago and bootstrapping all the tiny and big things that are needed to run a software project with more than 10 million lines of code, this project also en passant enabled things like this:

Despite initial skepticism, I by now firmly believe LibreOffice to be the project that will be able to change the world. Too many individuals in this project succeeded in doing the unreasonable, the foolish and the impossible. We started from nothing and we are still very hungry. We do not fear to innovate, just because someone thinks it would be unreasonable. We will: Stay hungry, Stay foolish. And we are just getting started.

P.S.: Lets each take this opportunity to look back down the road and thank somebody for doing something impossible, foolish or unreasonable. I, for one, thank Thorsten, Florian and Mike for their tireless and invisible work setting up the foundation: Thank you. And Norbert Thiebaud for doing all the hard work on the OneGit migration making bibisect possible in the first place: Again, Thank you! And Christopher M. Penalver, Rainer Bielefeld, Cor Nouws, Sasha and many more for relentless bug wrangling: Again, Thank you! And Rico Tzschichholz for providing backports: Again, Thank you!

Please add more thanks in the comments, on twitter, g+ or whatever!
Read more